Free Republic

Charles Portis, an El Dorado native best known for his 1968 novel True Grit, died on Monday at a Little Rock hospice facility. He was 86. The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, which was diagnosed in 2012, said his brother, Jonathan Portis. Portis published five novels — Norwood (1966), True Grit (1968), The Dog of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1985), and Gringos (1991) — and the non-fiction Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany (2012). True Grit, the story of fictional 14-year-old Mattie Ross from Yell County, Ark., who recruits U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn to avenge...

When 18-year-old NASCAR star Hailie Deegan heard that President Donald Trump was going to attend the Daytona 500, she went on a quest to get Trump to sign her helmet. It was a quest that only the president’s son could facilitate. Ahead of the big race, Deegan jumped to Twitter to let fans know that she was in the hunt for the president’s autograph. Hailie Deegan ✔ @HailieDeegan Today’s goal. Get my helmet signed by Trump https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1228810073171951621 … Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump Remember, will be at Daytona 500 tomorrow! Amusingly, Don Trump, Jr., saw the tweet and made one...

A New York University professor is one of the masterminds behind the anarchist group that organized the rampage through the subways last month, destroying turnstiles, stranding thousands of commuters and spray-painting “F–k Cops” on station walls. Amin Husain, 44, is a co-founder of Decolonize This Place, which urged its radical followers in a social media campaign to “f-ck sh-t up” on Jan. 31 in a violent assault on the city’s transit system that concluded with 13 arrests and $100,000 in damage. Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was “repulsed” by the hooliganism, and Police Commissioner Dermot Shea called the so-called...

A man was telling his buddy : "You won't believe what happened last night. My daughter walked into the living room and said: Dad, cancel my allowance immediately, forget my college tuition loan, rent my room out, throw all my clothes out the window, take my TV and my laptop. Please take any of my jewelry to the Salvation Army or Cash Converters. Then sell my car, take my front door key away, and throw me out of the house. Then disown me and never talk to me again. And don't forget to write me out of your will and...

A bakery in the western German city of Cologne has caused a storm in local media for its selling of dark-glazed pastries with exaggerated facial features. Some of the pastries — normally a kind of meringue on wafer covered in plain chocolate — were sporting eyes, nose and thick red lips, with some even carrying bones on top of their heads or comical hats. The white-faced pastries have glasses and carry on their heads what is known as a fez, a felt hat with a tassel that was popular during the Ottoman Empire. The pastry, now known as “Schokokuss” (Chocolate...

RUSH: Let me start with an attempt – I still have the remnants of the flu, but everything is fine, folks. I need to find a way beyond what I’ve already done to express my heartfelt gratitude and thanks and appreciation for the outpouring that continues to come in from people. I can’t respond to all of it. I’m starting to feel guilty about it. Because so many people are sending me — people that I haven’t heard from in I don’t know how long and finding a way to reach me, finding a way to get through to me...

Attorney General Bill Barr has tapped a growing number of federal prosecutors across the country to review high-profile Russia probes involving Trump associates and consider emerging allegations tied to Ukraine, in a bold but risky move that comes as he faces mounting criticism and even resignation calls from congressional Democrats who allege he's protecting the president. Meanwhile, Barr has tapped other several federal prosecutors to review DOJ cases. Last week, Barr confirmed that the Justice Department was reviewing information about Ukraine coming to the agency from the president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and others. Barr has tapped U.S. Attorney Scott...

Boeing's 737 Next Generation airliners have been struck by a peculiar software flaw that blanks the airliners' cockpit screens if pilots dare attempt a westwards landing at specific airports. Amid the various well-reported woes facing America's largest airframe maker, yet another one has emerged from the US Federal Aviation Administration; a bug that causes all pilots' display screens in the 737-NG airliner family to simply go blank.

Annie Glenn, the wife of the late astronaut and U.S. Sen. John Glenn, is turning 100 Monday and is doing fine, a spokesman said. But she is eschewing the media spotlight that shone on her and her husband for nearly six decades. “The Glenn family is appreciative of the continued affection and interest toward Annie. She is well but is no longer doing interviews,” Hank Wilson, a spokesman for the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University, said in an email.

It's fine for the Orthodox Churches to seek for the Head of State to be their 13th Apostle, a role in the East since Constantine (Arian heretic). This Pope's secret sponsorship of married clergy is another point of triangulation, showing that he seeks "Ecumenical" re-union with the Reformation and Orthodoxy while giving away the store. Another point of reference is the Nepotosm of hereditary priesthood. I attend an Eastern Rite Catholic congregation with married priests. I see a 7 year old son of a priest behind the stasis, not during the consecration, reserved as it is for Priests and Deacons,...

60 Minutes ran a segment shilling for CrowdStrike last night. They must be scared. They should be scared. Here’s just a fraction of what 60 Minutes didn’t say about CrowdStrike and their story that the Russians hacked the DNC.

"Eleven years ago today, near the bottom of the worst recession in generations, I signed the Recovery Act, paving the way for more than a decade of economic growth and the longest streak of job creation in American history."

Feb. 14 (UPI) -- A Maine woman who lost her then-boyfriend's class ring in 1973 was reunited with the precious item after it was found buried in a park in Finland. Debra McKenna, 63, said her then-boyfriend, Shawn, gave her the Morse High School ring before he headed to college in 1973 and she accidentally left it in a bathroom at the Porteous, Mitchell & Braun Co. department store in Portland only a few months later. McKenna and Shawn married in 1977 and remained together until he died in 2017 after a long fight with cancer. The woman said the...

Two former volleyball stars and their 12-year-old daughters have died after a 'DUI suspect' crashed into their van as they traveled to a tournament in Kansas City, Missouri. The vehicle crossed the median on Interstate 64 in St. Charles County, emerged into westbound lanes near Highway 364 and hit the minivan carrying the two families from Louisville, Kentucky head-on. The van then collided with an SUV at 10.38am Friday.

RUSH: This Mayor Pete stuff. What do you think the main reason the Drive-Bys went batty over this? I didn’t lecture Mayor Pete on anything. I didn’t say anything anti-gay. I didn’t even offer an opinion of my own. I was asking people to analyze — asking people to imagine how the Democrat power base was looking at their options after the Hawkeye Cauci and New the Hampshire primary. I’ll replay the bite for you. It takes about two minutes to go through, but at no point was there a lecture of Mayor Pete on family values or anything else....

Massachusetts Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D) and Ed Markey (D) expressed “grave concerns” in a letter Sunday about reported plans to deploy Customs and Border Protection (CBP) SWAT teams into so-called sanctuary cities. In the letter to the heads of CBP, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the two addressed the CBP announcement that its Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) will be deployed to several cities that refuse to cooperate with the Trump administration on immigration enforcement. "The BORTAC deployment to Boston and other cities is unnecessary, unwelcome, and dangerous. But the specter of heavily...

The Little Merman Who Couldn’t Why yes, that Is Mike Bloomberg with a fish tail singing a New York version of “Under the Sea.” Both these clips surfaced yesterday on Twitter, undoubtedly from Bernie Sanders operatives. See both videos here…: https://twitter.com/search?q=bloomberg%20broadway&src=typd

Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler's profits slumped by almost two-thirds in 2019 as the legal costs of the "dieselgate" scandal and heavy investments in electric technology took their toll. The German carmaker's net profit fell to €2.7bn (£2.3bn) for 2019, it announced on Tuesday, almost €5bn worse than the previous year's performance. It also slashed its dividend from €3.25 per share to only 90 cents to help preserve cash to plough into electric vehicle technology. Daimler is carrying out swingeing cuts to its global workforce as it tries to save more than €1bn in costs. In November it said it would cut...

Tom Steyer leads a tight race in the Nevada Democratic Caucus with a slim 2-point lead, according to a poll commissioned and conducted by Point Blank Political; however, the top five candidates are all within the poll’s 5.6 percent margin of error. Steyer, Klobuchar, Biden, Sanders and Buttigieg led the pack, while Warren and Gabbard were decidedly behind the leaders. Point Blank Political surveyed 256 likely Democratic caucus-goers from February 13th through February 15th. The survey results were weighted by race, gender, and age using a Random Iterative Model and the model’s weighting efficiency was 84 percent, resulting in an...

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump raced from the Daytona 500 to his namesake DC hotel Sunday night for the wedding of senior adviser Stephen Miller and Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary, Katie Waldman. The affair took place at the Trump International Hotel and included a ceremony officiated by Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone, senior adviser to US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, according to the couple’s New York Times wedding announcement. Former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and wife Sally were also in attendance. The former Republican National Committee chairman posted a photo of him and his...